The Second Drop

It feels like a good time to reclaim my roller coaster metaphor from the beginning of the school year. You know how most roller coasters are constructed: that first huge incline and drop to get you going, a series of twists and turns until you slow down a bit, then a second big climb and drop to send you hurtling through the second half? Well, here we are at the beginning of our second semester, and I can feel it right in the pit of my stomach all over again.

I put off prepping for our return to schoolwork until the last possible second. Last night, after the kids went to bed, I finally cleared all of the accumulated stuff off my desk and made room for the new desk accessories and supplies RobotBoy gave me for Christmas. Then, I sat down to review the lesson plans I so carefully wrote last summer and update them to reflect the changes we made back in November. By the time I finally went to bed a little after 1:00 am, it was with the satisfaction of knowing a whole sheaf of freshly printed and three-hole-punched pages lay gleaming in my planning notebook. I felt all prepared and organized and as ready as a person could be.

Then I slept right through my alarm—something I almost never do—and didn’t wake up until I heard Moonheart doing her morning guitar practice.

The holiday season kept us unusually busy this year, so we more or less limped into the end of the first semester. Moonheart did manage to finish her Microeconomics course, although she had to work well into what should have been vacation time to do so. The good news is that she did well enough on her final exam to hang onto her A for the class. I don’t think it has quite sunk in for her just exactly what a big difference this is going to make in her workload and her daily schedule. She spent a week working on the new Precalculus class before we decided it was just plain more work than she was prepared to do this year. I encouraged her to drop it. And the combination of Nutcracker madness and general holiday excitement kept RobotBoy from focusing on much of anything academic from mid-November onward, meaning that he ended the semester with a backlog of work in several subjects that will have to be made up over the course of the second semester.

Since the last math class Moonheart didn’t hate was Geometry, we decided to see if we could find her an advanced geometry course/text/curriculum. We settled on a text from Key Curriculum Press called Advanced Euclidean Geometry, which integrates a lot of exercises using Geometer’s Sketchpad. It looks really promising. However, by the time both the book and software actually arrived, it didn’t seem worth getting started only to break for the holidays. So, she will be starting that today. She will also be starting her reading for the Introduction to Philosophy course I have laid out for her. And our history/literature focus will shift from the middle ages to the Renaissance. Her composition work will become more demanding, as she moves into the essay-writing section of Wordsmith Craftsman.

Changes and additions for RobotBoy this semester include slowing down his pace in Latin for Children. I’ve noticed that he seems to be struggling a bit this year and that doing his Latin has become extremely unpleasant. So, I’ve decided to stretch Primer B over two years and to aim for having him finish only the first half of the book this year. He’s also doing the translations from the accompanying Libellus de Historia, so it should be enough to keep him busy. He will be starting the Carson Dellosa World Geography workbook, moving on to Orbiting with Logic and adding a page or two of sentence diagramming to his weekly workload.

Other than that, life continues more or less as usual. We did add a new kitten to our family just before Christmas. May I just say how much “fun” it was to have a Christmas tree and gifts with all those lovely and tempting ribbons on them in the house with two young cats? I do think their favorite thing was the electric Lego train, though.

But now the lights and decorations are down. We have one more week before most of the extracurriculars get underway again. And I admit to being more than a bit relieved to have our limited living space tree- and train-free and to be sitting at a relatively clean and well-organized desk with a fresh set of lesson plans in front of me and a whole new semester in which to learn and grow along with my kids.

Wishing you all a smooth post-holiday transition and a great ride!

Note: This message was edited and approved by Bessie the guinea pig, despite the fact that she believes there are too many cats in it.